Category Archives: Healthcare

For Margaret Laws, Innovation Springs From Co-Creation

May 4, 2021Business, Health, Healthcare, Innovation, Insights, StartupsAdolescent Health, adolescents, California Health Care Foundation, child health, HopeLab, Margaret Laws, mental health, mental illness, Steven KreinStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:29 — 73.5MB)

Longtime friend of StartUp Health Margaret Laws has built a career on cross-sector, interdisciplinary partnerships. For 17 years, she served as the Director of Public Financing and Policy and the Director of Innovation for the Underserved program at the California Health Care Foundation. Today, as CEO and President of HopeLab, a social innovation lab founded and funded by the creators of eBay, she’s shifted her focus toward improving the health and wellbeing of adolescents. HopeLab’s multifactorial approach seeks to broach the many systemic and structural causes of mental illness in young people: “If there’s one thing that really requires multi-sectoral collaboration, this is it,” Laws says. At a recent Fireside Chat with StartUp Health co-founder Steven Krein, Laws explained how HopeLab’s uniquely holistic approach allows the company to tackle challenges from every angle.

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Michelle Snyder Brings a Creative Spirit to Marketing and Investing

April 27, 2021Business, Health, Healthcare, Innovation, Insights, StartupsDigital Health, investing, Logan Plaster, McKesson Ventures, Michelle Snyder, startupsStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:20 — 74.6MB)

Michelle Snyder has done a bit of everything. Now a partner at McKesson Ventures (she joined the healthcare-oriented venture group in late 2020), the digital health veteran has seen innovation from every angle: driving the marketing behind startups like Epocrates and Welltok, mentoring early-stage entrepreneurs in accelerator and incubator programs, and making strategic investments at Welltok and now McKesson. But it’s her willingness to roll up her sleeves and develop creative solutions to challenges that makes Snyder an exceptional Jill-of-all-trades. Snyder took a look back on her career to date in a recent StartUp Health Fireside Chat that was as fun and freewheeling as it is chock-full of good advice.

Former Livongo President Dr. Jennifer Schneider Talks Moonshots, the Teladoc Merger, and How to Be a Transformative Leader

March 30, 2021Business, Health, Healthcare, Innovation, StartupsUnity StoakesStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:48 — 73.9MB)

In this candid conversation with Unity Stoakes, President and Co-founder of StartUp Health, Dr. Schneider shares her hard-won wisdom and pulls back the curtain on one of healthcare’s biggest M&A transactions.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com

Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Aidar Health Scores FDA Clearance for New Breath-Based “Tricorder” Health Monitoring Device

March 23, 2021Business, Health, Healthcare, Innovation, StartupsAccess to care, Cure Disease, Logan Plaster, Pandemic ResponseStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:04 — 34.4MB)

In this episode, we talk with Sathya Elumalai, CEO & Co-founder of Aidar Health, a StartUp Health company since 2016. Sathya and his team in Baltimore have invented something that could change healthcare as we know it. It’s a simple-looking device that you hold in your hand and breathe into for 30 seconds. From that simple act, the device — MouthLab — can pull more than 10 vitals. What’s even more impressive is that they’ve clinically validated the health tests at the highest level. Sathya breaks it all down in our interview and explains his moonshot vision for the future of remote monitoring and chronic disease management.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com

GE Healthcare’s Karley Yoder Builds Bridges With AI

March 16, 2021Business, Health, Healthcare, Innovation, StartupsAccess to care, Cost to Zero, Cure Disease, GE, karley yoder, Logan PlasterStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:39 — 77.8MB)

Karley Yoder made a name for herself in the digital health world at Doctor on Demand and Apple before launching a career at GE Healthcare, where she now serves as Vice President and General Manager of Artificial Intelligence. Today, she works to find the signal in the noise surrounding AI, helping the company leverage its potential to improve patient outcomes, rather than to apply, as she puts it, “technology for technology’s sake.” Yoder joined the StartUp Health community at a recent Fireside Chat, where she explained how impact-driven AI can help to expand care teams, why effective partnerships are built on practical approaches to problems, and how an ecosystem of “GE-plus-others” can help ensure positive, sustainable change.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com

Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Toby Cosgrove Sees Moonshot Potential in an After-COVID World

March 2, 2021Business, Health, Healthcare, Innovation, StartupsAccess to care, Pandemic Response, Steven Krein, Unity StoakesStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:27 — 61.1MB)

While this may be the first global pandemic Toby Cosgrove, MD, has experienced, he’s seen a lot in his nearly 50-year career. The Executive Advisor and former CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic is also a former heart surgeon, a Vietnam War veteran, and now a member of the StartUp Health board of advisors and our Health Moonshot Impact Force. As Dr. Cosgrove sees it, COVID-19 has shifted the national healthcare puzzle to reveal its missing pieces, creating new openings for improvement and innovation. These include new delivery systems for healthcare, greater collaboration, better use of data, and accelerated innovation. In a recent conversation with the StartUp Health community led by Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes, Dr. Cosgrove shared his thoughts on our current moment and what comes next.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com

The Surprising Secret to Doctor.com’s Success

February 16, 2021Business, Health, Healthcare, Innovation, StartupsAccess to care, andrei zimiles, doctor.com, Logan Plaster, reed mollins, StartUp HealthStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:25 — 74.7MB)

Andrei Zimiles and Reed Mollins, founders of Doctor.com, are longtime friends and longtime friends of StartUp Health. The two met as pre-teens at summer camp and led parallel lives before becoming partners and entrepreneurs, dropping out of high school at age 16 and transferring out of and into the very same colleges. And just as their friendship has been something of a journey, so, too, has their professional relationship, from Doctor.com’s origins at rented desks in a dusty Soho co-working space (the two vividly recall a garbage bag duct-taped over a broken window) to its acquisition this past fall by Press Ganey.

Zimiles and Mollins joined StartUp Health back in 2013 and returned to share their hard-won wisdom at a recent Fireside Chat. In a wide-ranging conversation amongst friends, the duo explained how their attitude towards sales and approach to building partnerships took Doctor.com from its humble beginnings to its lucrative exit.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com

Walmart Could Magnify Americans’ Access to Healthcare — With the Help of Key Startups

February 11, 2021Business, Health, Healthcare, Innovation, StartupsAccess to care, dentistry, diagnostics, Doctor, Doctor visits, Evan Schnur, Logan Plaster, Moonshots, Primary care, StartUp Health, Walmart, Walmart HealthStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:31 — 57.0MB)

In the era of social distancing, a doctor’s appointment looks a little different than it did a year ago. But Evan Schnur, Director of Healthcare Information and Strategy at Walmart, says the experience will continue to evolve, even after in-person visits resume. Schnur trained as a pharmacist and currently leads the development of the growing range of healthcare services at Walmart Health, which now include primary care visits, diagnostics, and dentistry. The massive scale of the world’s largest company by revenue offers new avenues for prevention and treatment that could shatter the paradigm for medical care. In a recent StartUp Health Fireside Chat, Schnur explained what that future might look like and why healthcare startups might play a key role.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com

UCSF’s Dr. Michael Blum Talks How COVID-19 Changed Expectations Around Virtual Care at the Highest Institutional Levels

December 15, 2020Healthcarecoronavirus, Covid 19, COVID19, Logan Plaster, Pandemic ResponseStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:24 — 80.2MB)

As a cardiologist and the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Michael Blum assesses and deploys digital health technology across UCSF’s multi-layered health system. In this week’s podcast episode, we get an inside look at how one of the biggest, most advanced hospital systems in the United States thinks about health innovation, what successful integration looks like, what he looks for in a startup partner, and how COVID-19 changed expectations around virtual care at the highest institutional levels. This episode is pulled from a recent StartUp Health Fireside Chat where StartUp Health’s Editor-in-Chief, Logan Plaster, interviewed Dr. Michael Blum in a live session, which was attended by a panel of founders from the Startup Health portfolio.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com

Conversa Health Built on Its Virtual Care Platform to Quickly Launch COVID-19 Screening Tools for Frontline Workers

December 8, 2020HealthcareAccess to care, coronavirus, Cost to Zero, Covid 19, COVID19, Cure Disease, Logan Plaster, Pandemic ResponseStartUp Health

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:30 — 68.0MB)

Today’s episode is a conversation with Murray Brozinsky, CEO of Conversa Health. Before COVID-19 struck, Conversa was working with big health systems, supplying them with a type of chatbot that kept patients and doctors connected between appointments. Turns out a few well-worded and well-timed questions, even if they’re automated, can improve care and reduce costly bouncebacks. When COVID-19 hit, Murray and his team knew they had the technology – and institutional relationships – to really make a difference. They quickly scaled up multiple COVID-specific products using automated chat and have seen massive growth in 2020 as a result. This conversation with Murray is pulled from a recent Expert Office Hour, which was attended virtually by an audience of other founders from the StartUp Health portfolio. We dug into how Conversa was able to stay nimble and grow in spite of uncertainty, and other Health Transformers weigh in with their thoughts as well.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com